For the first time in medical history, an autonomous drone has helped to save a man’s life after suffering cardiac arrest. In a statement by Swedish drone company Everdrone, they said that a 71-year-old had a heart attack while shovelling snow and was resuscitated by a nearby doctor after a drone flew in a defibrillator.
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Everdrone’s Emergency Medical Aerial Delivery (EMADE) service is designed to deliver help as quickly as possible, as someone having a heart attack needs medical help within 10 minutes to survive. EMADE allows emergency dispatchers to send a drone carrying the device to a caller’s home, which enables the lifesaving process to begin significantly earlier than when the ambulance arrives. In this case, it took the drone about three minutes to deliver the defibrillator to the patent’s location. A bystander, who happened to be a doctor, was able to use the AED on the patient after providing CPR.
“This is an excellent real-world example of how Everdrone’s cutting edge drone technology, fully integrated with emergency dispatch, can minimize the time for access to live-saving AED equipment,” Everdrone CEO Mats Sällström said.
Everdrone conducted a pilot test over four months, testing the EMADE programme with real-world heart attack alerts. During the testing period EMADE received 14 heart attack alerts, and in all but one of the cases where a drone was deployed a defibrillator was delivered. In 64 percent of the cases the drone reached the alert location before the ambulance could arrive.
According to Everdrone, about 275,000 people suffer from cardiac arrest in Europe every year with about 70 percent of the cases occurring in a private home without a defibrillator on site. Unfortunately, the survival rate is only about 10 percent. The EMADE programme hopes to increase these survival rates with quick and reliable delivery of the lifesaving equipment needed.
